What Does The Literary Agent Do?

The literary agent represents the interest of the writer as well as their work to publishers and assists in the sale and negotiation of the writer's works. Generally, literary agents represent novelists, screenwriters, and prominent non-fiction writers.
The literary agent makes their living by taking a percentage of a writer's earnings, usually between 10 to 20%.

Writers usually hire an agent for numerous reasons, with the primary reason being that many of the major publishing houses do not accept unagented submissions. Generally, agents will only accept less than 1% of the authors who query them. Therefore, agents act as a filter, weeding out those works of low quality from works, which show potential.

Many times an agent may accept a writer who shows potential and whose works need slight polishing. Agents can then provide the influence needed in order to getting the work a favorable read by a publisher and ultimately sold.

Agents usually will manage approximately dozen clients whose works they're attempting to promote and sell at a given time. If an agent, has an extremely prolific and successful client the agent may not take on any new clients so that they can concentrate on that one client.

Usually the agent will have a limited area of expertise and will only represent only a single genre, whether it is Children's Literature, Horror, Science Fiction, or Romance, however, some agents many handle several genres such as science fiction, and fantasy. If a writer is lucky enough, to have their work sought after by the filming industry, then the film rights are usually subcontracted to an agent who specializes in them.

The agent will usually incurred expenses while in the process of selling the writer's work, such expenses may include photocopying, mailing, and any necessary trips or fees which the agent will bill the client. However, the agent should not bill the client until after the point of sale, and many times these expenses are waived if the agent cannot sell the work. If an agent insists that the client pays these expenses before the work has sold, then this is often seen as a sign of a scam.

Clients usually will query an agent before submitting any work to them or if the agent has already met the client at a writer's conference, through a contest, or via other means the agent may request that the writer send them a synopsis of their
work.

The query letter is an unsolicited proposal for representation of either a finished work or unfinished work and is usually no longer than 1-2 pages. The query letter will give a brief explanation of the work, as well as the authors writing qualifications. If the query letter interests the agent then they may request a synopsis of the work along with the first three chapters.

The synopsis is often five to ten pages detailing the story. It is vital that the author presents as much information about the story as possible, and not hide any major details or secrets from the agent. It is also important that the author includes with their query and synopsis a SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope), which is standard protocol. E-queries are often not accepted by many agents for a variety of reasons.

After reviewing your synopsis and partial manuscript, the agent will then request a full manuscript. If the agent sees potential and believes that they can sell the manuscript, then they will accept the author. Usually and traditionally, contracts
between agents and clients are verbal. However, there are an increasing number of agents who are using written contracts that state every detail of the agreement between them and the author.

Unfortunately, if your query, synopsis, or manuscript are rejected this will be sent to you in the SASE that you included. The vast number of query letters as well as synopsis is rejected and usually as a form letter. However, if there is a hand-written comment requesting that you query them about other projects, this is seen as a very positive sign.

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